Here are some lessons that I learned from the whole Dave Winer weblogs.com affair.

• Own you own domain name. If your blog is at your own domain name, then if you are using a hosted service and somebody takes it down, you can move your content without breaking links.
• Keep backups of everything that is hosted by everybody else

In the long run, it will be so easy to host your stuff, that you will rather than having to worry about other people taking down your stuff. Decentralists rule long term!

The Norman family is just about ready for the big trek across the Rockies. We're heading to Vancouver for NMC 2004 Summer Conference, then across to the Island for a few days before returning home.

As a result, things are likely going to get quiet(er) around here. I'll likely be blogging something from the NMC 2004 conference, but aside from that, I hope to be completely offline for the week following the conference.

Well, we're about an hour away from the Small Pieces session at NMC 2004. There has been a surprising amount of interest from people in the hallways, and some actual traffic on the weblog and wiki.

My gut tells me this may go exactly one of two ways, either:

1. Raving success
2. Confusing chaotic failure

My vote is currently on the first one (I think this is going to be fun for all involved, too), and I'm hoping that the real meat of the session shifts away from the tools themselves and into the somewhat contrived discussion we've tried to set up.

See my post at:

Decentralists_ Rule in 10_years or_so AKA I am an NMC 2004 fencesitter

for why

I'm trying a little experiment over on the Decentralists Weblog for the NMC 2004 Summer Conference.

The weblog can be edited via the web, and is password protected. I'm going to try it for a while with a public password, so folks can add/edit content. I'm not crazy. I've backed it up so if things go south I can restore it pretty quickly.

Flame-retardant suit is handy, just in case...

Just did some more searching on the Omni WO-Dev list to see if anyone else has cracked the same nut. Turns out not so much. Looks like everyone who needs to connect to an XML database just goes ahead and uses the database's API(s) directly, forgoing EOF completely.

Here are some links of people who are/were interested in this problem:

• WO-Dev Search results for "Tamino"
  • Carl Jones (MIT) - WebObjects and XML Databases? (looking at storing METS docs)
  • Georg Tuparev - WebObjects and XML Databases? (unofficially ported Tamino to MacOSX)
  • Shyam Sundar - EOF with Database Adaptor = None ?
  • Steve Ivy - XML as EO
  • Ute Hoffmann - Tamino and WebObjects
  • Steve Quirk (IEEE) - Tamino and WebObjects

I'm just downloading the 147 MB full archive of the mailing list so I can do some better searches (the web form keeps stripping out the "xml" term, which makes it kinda useless when searching for xml-related posts... )

Alan, Brian and myself are hitting the road again. This time, we'll be presenting at the NMC 2004 Summer Conference in Vancouver (June 16-19, 2004).

The topic of this presentation is "Small Pieces Loosely Joined", and it's a session that we hope will be a bit, well, different. It's a hands-on session, with attendees actually playing with (er, using) some of the various tools that are available.

The plan is to take the folks in Vancouver, and split them into 3 groups. We'll assign each group to a role. They'll become either "Centralists" ( bent on global domination with the One True Application ), "Decentralists" ( complete anarchists, with bits and pieces scattered across and off the 'net ), or the more conservative "Fence Sitters" (who will try whatever works, but aren't religious about it).

I was just googling to see if someone else had written an EO wrapper for a DOM Document model, and came up with this gem: XML and WebObjects KeyValueCoding by Michael Henderson.

At first blush, this looks like exactly what I need to do. It should be possible to build a pretty solid/transparent/functional DOM wrapper. Probably in a subclass of EOGenericRecord or something like it.

UPDATE: 2004/06/02 - I got it working quite nicely this morning. I query an XStreamDB database, pull all results, read out the full XML of each result, and then feed these into the wrapper class based on Michael's XMLKeyValueCoding class. I use lazy binding, so the parse to Document doesn't happen unless/until it's needed - this should save a lot of time in cases where the results are used in WODisplayGroups etc...

I'm working on finishing the EOAdaptor for XStreamDB, and one route I'm exploring is taking the source XML from XStreamDB, running it through DOM and then into full EOs. I've been playing around with DOM libraries, and just checked out the latest beta of dom4j.

It's evolved into one sweet library - basically takes the standard Document model, and wraps XPath, XSLT and other goodness around it. They're even working on adding schema and validation support (which will be very handy for anyone creating XML documents on the fly. Like, say, in APOLLO...

I've had this happen several times, so I guess it's pretty repeatable. If you are editing some text in a multiline text field in form in Safari, hitting undo (command+z) crashes the browser.

Especially frustrating when editing documents in say, a wiki... I was just beefing up my page for the NMC 2004 summer conference, and accidentally deleted a link on the wiki form. I hit undo, hoping to just drop the link back in there, but was greeted instead by a MacOSX Application Crash dialog box.

Feel free to contribute to this weblog. It's running on Blosxom, and is using a plugin that allows editing of posts via a web browser. All you need to know is the password, and you can create posts.

Editing existing entries

To edit this post, just click the "edit" link below. An editing form will show up, letting you type some text.

Posts should be entered as HTML in order to be formatted properly. It's pretty straightforward. Just look at the source of this post in the edit page.

This blog is for the purposes of the "Small Technologies Loosely Joined" presentation at the June 2004 NMC Summer Conference.

This is the place to publish the support (or the lack thereof) for the "Decentralists" in terms of maximizing effectiveness through the use of small, organized, and distributed resources.

In this presentation, we have created three groups who will use a collection of "small" discrete, loosely joined technologies, to argue positions of Centralized, Decentralized, and Mixed implementations of instructional technologies. Participants include those present at our session June 15 as well as other edubloggers who can join us in blogs, wiki, and chat space. Follow the coverage via the EDU_RSS feed.